Recently, the Copyright Alert System (CAS) — otherwise known as the Six Strikes program — debuted across various major ISPs, perhaps striking fear into the hearts of many a pirate. The system works by providing warnings and punishments through a graduated scale, eventually leading to punishments involving throttling bandwidth or hijacking your browser. While attempting to curb piracy isn’t some kind of fiendish goal like many pirates would have you believe, what was worrisome about the system is if it would incorrectly identify someone as a pirate, and accidentally punish them. Unfortunately, according to one report, this is quite possible.

MediaFire user David Sutherland received a DMCA letter that stated he was caught hosting illegal files on his account. The letter said he was hosting pirated TV shows, including Downton Abbey, Grimm, and The Office. Almost comically, the letter said that the file in question that could have been one of the listed pirated shows was called “Cantha Cartography Made Easy 2009.tpf.” This is actually a mod for Guild Wars — not even close to pirated content. The scary part is that the group that identified the game mod as a pirated TV show, DtecNet, is a division of a company — MarkMonitor — that is responsible for monitoring the Six Strikes program. As pointed out by Techdirt, the Center for Copyright Information — which is a party responsible for the CAS — has a page on its website dedicated to MarkMonitor’s anti-piracy methodologies. Unfortunately, the page is totally blank, save for the title.

While Sutherland’s situation doesn’t prove that DtecNet slings piracy accustations without reason, it certainly isn’t a good sign for the CAS when a company that is responsible for monitoring the Six Strikes program can’t (or didn’t bother to) tell the difference between a legal file and an illegal one, especially when they’re two completely different files to begin with.

There aren’t any devastating Six Strikes horror stories just yet, but Sutherland’s situation shows that said horror stories could easily happen.